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This book was a schemata tsunami for me. As I read thru FOLKS, I also looked to my bookshelf to parallel read Anne Sexton & Sylvia Plath...Cynthia Bryant writes telling truth with musical cadence. A memorable poem for me in this collection is "Voice of a Still-Small Boy, a voice Phil Levine had in his "Cry for Nothing. 

Hugs...Gordon B. Preston

When Words Die, Poets are no more…

 

 

As the world shrinks

our capacity to hold words and ideas

diminishes

like a six-lane freeway

blasted down

to a solitary dirt road

 

In community after village

whispers fan out

Single syllable words

have the power

to turn childhood to stone,

blanch the enamel

off red ruby nails,

drive grown men mad!

 

In this, the Land of the free

where leaders label man-made enemies

“haters of freedom”

Our freedoms are whittled down

packaged to sell

fed to us in rote

fed to us in rote

fed to us in rote

 

God-fearing Americans

march along

straight and stilted paths

where no space is found

for two opposing views

to walk together

 

The righteous warm their hands

around the hellfire of burning books

Imagination of childhood

extinguished by terrorists

under hoods of Christ

Somewhere he shakes his head

Somewhere he shakes his head

Somewhere he shakes his head

and weeps


 FOLKS
     
by

Cynthia L Bryant

Addend

 

Few people notice

A lone woman as she makes

Her way along wetted asphalt

Walks with head down

Where puddles glisten

Interpreting the many shades of gray

The shame pushed out over every inch

Serves to cloak her sensitive skin

From others prying

 

Her eyes catch the reflection

the knife stabs deep

        

    

        sorry, out of  print

 

  

        

    

        sorry, out of  print

 

  

Dark Mother

 

 So many

     You said    I said

     You thrust    I parry

      over the years

did not brace me

against the cutting response

to happy news

     A new baby on its way

 

Get an abortion--

 

Your words

splay my skin

take up residence

then bounce off the inside walls

like a puppy

popped into the microwave

Push Start

 

Jealously is a mother

who could bear no fruit

resents a daughter

who fell into pregnancy

as easily as you

wiped up

the microwave

Bad Blood

Daddy told me

bad blood soaked the cloth

    when I   unwanted progeny

hung upside-down between

this world and oblivion

 

Surmised how 

   my birth mother's blood

   flowed first on the backseat 

   of some car

making me a cheap commodity

on the adoption Black Market

Never let me forget 

that the same bad blood 

swam beneath

my thin skin 

like a Great White

waiting to surface

hungry to feed

 

 

                                      

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